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jrepin writes "The Calligra team has announced the first release of the Calligra suite of office and creativity applications. This marks the end of a long development period lasting almost one and a half year. It is the first release in a long series which is planned to make improved applications every 4 months. Calligra is a continuation of the old KOffice project and it may be interesting for KOffice users to know what they will get. Some highlights are: a completely rewritten text layout engine that can handle most of the advanced layout features of OpenDocument Format (ODF), simplified user interface, support for larger parts of the ODF specification (for example line endings like arrows), and improved import filters for Microsoft document formats. There are also two new applications: Flow for diagrams and flowcharts, and Braindump for the note taking. Calligra Active is a new interface for touch based devices and especially for the KDE Plasma Active environment. Several companies have already used Calligra as a base for their own office solution. One of them is Nokia with their N9 high end smartphone where Calligra is embedded into the so called Harmattan Office."

OpenOffice's fork libreoffice is probably the best. I haven't had a chance to play with calligra, but Koffice is a joke. Sure its fast and lightweight, but it doesn't really render any documment type very well (ODF or Microsoft formats) and crashes at every chance. There are individual applications like Krita the photo editing app that are solid decent apps, but the main Office aps ( word processor, spreadsheet, slide show presenter) suck.

Ach, forgot Krita changed. Calligra isn't really easy to test right now without going outside of my distro's binary packages. Not willing to destablize my daily desktop to try it. I'm sure they've improved it since the fork, they've had more than enough time to do so....

That's a pity, b'cos I've used it a few times, and found it a lot simpler to use than GIMP. So does Calligra (glad they didn't spell it w/ a 'K') include any other do-it-all for images? I also agree w/ the GP about KOffice - used it, but found the spreadsheet woefully short of what I got w/ Excel 2003. However, would be happy to try Calligra - mainly important that their word processor, spreadsheet and slide show presenter are good. Also, do they include any database like Access?

I have heard this before, but i have not had problems with Koffice for a few versions now.

Sure, it was more lightweight ( by design ) and not real compatible, but it was a nice light alternative to the big boys. Espcially when you realize that 90% of the features in the larger suites go un-used by 90% of the users.

That competition is ok and a good thing, as opposed to the stupid kde/gnome/unity/kfce/lxde joke. The office suits whirl around the standards, whereas the kde/gnome/unity/xfce/lxde joke more is about penises less than 6 inches.

Libreoffice's community is definitely better than OpenOffice, but I'm not so sure that it is better. It is still a young project, and I have had terrible trouble installing and upgrading the software. It is also very slow and contains plenty of bugs still.

I've heard a lot of people on/. state that libreoffice is better than OpenOffice, but I haven't heard many reasons why. What advantages does it have, beyond not being controlled by Oracle?

I've been using Open Office for years and have no complaints about it. (But at the same time, I don't use it in many advanced ways. After a certain point of complexity, I switch over more specific tools like Scribus.) Am I missing some fatal flaw in Open Office though, that libreoffice somehow fixes?

Libre office simply has more features. There were a lot of features people wanted to add to open office but couldn't get past the Sun gatekeeper. That lead to the Go-oo fork with all of those added in. Now they've merged with libreoffice, so all of those features and developers have been added into libre. Basically the bigest features for me are improved MS format fiedelity in reading and writing.

Yes, LibreOffice is the king here, but I at least Caligre is trying new things. Look at the sidebars in the spreadsheet program. This is an interesting placement for extra functions, and there are quite a lot of them. This is an alternative to menu's and ribbons, that is a different (no judgement on better or worse yet) approach, and is consistent throughout the application suite. I have to hand it to them for using the power of QT and will want to see how that works for me.

Depends in part on whether you're starting from go-oo or regular OO. Go-oo was a set of patches created by merging all the independent patches created by Novell and Debian, and not accepted by Sun. Most Linux distros offered Go-oo under the name OpenOffice. Go-oo had several features not supported by upstream OO.

LibreOffice started with Go-oo, then undertook a massive code cleanup which resulted in a functionally identical, but much smaller, faster, and easier-to-maintain, code base. Then they started a

Once that's complete (if it's not already), they'll still be quite a bit behind where LO started, even if they don't end up removing any functionality, because Go-oo wasn't donated to Apache, and is still under the GPL. So, they'll have something that is much larger, much slower, much harder to maintain, and they'll be way behind on features. At that point, the question becomes can they possibly catch up?

How is three explicit licenses any more prone to forking than one promiscuous license that allows all sorts of sublicensing? I can create a GPL-only fork of ApacheOO just as easily as I can create a GPL-only fork of LO. Your argument makes no sense.

Good news about the Symphony fork I suppose. I wish both projects the best of luck, but my money's still on LO at the moment, and OO is going to have to do some amazing things to change my mind.

This is how I feel about anything that starts with a 'K' or spawned from it. Not a big fan of the "Let's copy Microsoft's really bad interface, and not use established standards by requiring our own huge set of daemons to run for IPC instead" crowd.

I guess what I'm asking (and I know this is subjective and I'm not looking to start a pissing contest here), is OpenOffice still the best alternative to Office out there? And how do some of these new alternatives compare (to each other and to Office)?

If you are still using old fashioned.doc files or ODF, you can get away with using OpenOffice/LibreOffice. I've used OO.o with MSOffice 97-03 files for the past 6 years with minimal compatibility problems. However, all that goes out the window with OOXML files, since support for that is still abysmal in OO.o or LO. For instance, don't even think of editing a moderately complex (multi-level headings, lists, tables, etc.) docx in Writer. Writer makes a passable docx viewer but the file will be fucked up every single time if you modify it in Writer and then open it again in Word. I found that out the hard way.

I just had a look @ their site. There are several things I liked about it. For starters, they chose sane names - like have the name Calligra precede Words, Sheets, Stage, Plan and Flow. Kexi didn't make sense - why not re-use the term dBase, since dBase IV has been dead for decades, and for notetaking, I'm not sure I liked 'Braindump' - maybe something like 'Scratchpad' would have been better? But Krita and Karbon both need to be renamed - no offense to Swedish users.

The best non-free one is Softmaker Office. Multi-platform support, low price, almost perfect compatibility and good old menu-based UI. What you don't get with it is macro recorder - you have to write macros yourself in a VBA-like language called BasicMaker. And BasicMaker is Windows-only.

Wow, posting a dumb comment after only reading the headline -- not even the summary.The software is simply called Calligra and comes in three flavors:Calligra Suite -- complete package for desktop PCsCalligra Mobile -- smartphone version (limited feature set)Calligra Active -- tablet version (limited feature set)

Something I've liked about KDE recently has been the push for movable, sizable, and groupable widgets and sections in the UI. Some follow some sort of convention. Most don't. I'm hoping Calligra standardizes their UI stuffs, as right now it's kinda random.

I miss the days when there were a bunch of word processors / office suites competing. I switched through various versions of Ami Pro, WordPerfect, Word Star, and a couple others I can't remember right now. Then in the mid 90's Word started to dominate and has become a defacto standard. Competitors are judged by how well their Word filters work. Bummer.

It's not like the others were much better. I fact, I clearly remember ditching WP at some point because it kept messing up the layout of my documents. Eventually after a lot of crap I started doing my scientific stuff in latex. After that it was quickly clear why it's still the number one document processing enviroment for technical reports.

Wat really sucks is that the open alternatives mostly tried to copy word. They're still trying to play catch-up and haven't improved on the way you write reports one bit

There are also two new applications: Flow for diagrams and flowcharts, and Braindump for the note taking.

If it has something comparable to MS Visio, suddenly I'm interested. Visio is pretty much eh only piece of software in the MS Office suite which I haven't found at least a very rough FOSS competitor to. I've been pinning my hopes on Libre/Open Office coming up with something, and never given KOffice much thought. This makes it a bit of a game changer for when I'm deciding which free office suite to throw on my home computers.

Anyone have any experience running this software under Windows 7? Or Gnome/XFCE/LXDE for that matter? Any good?

There are some very early Windows builds for Calligra, but they are alpha quality at best

It really depends on the individual application. Eg. I found Calligra Words to be quite OK (limited testing only) but apparently the format filter for old.doc files is broken under Windows and had to be disabled before release.Could be that Flow is in a better state.

"Flow is an easy to use diagramming and flowcharting application with tight integration to the other Calligra applications. It enables you to create network diagrams, organisation charts, flowcharts and more."

That is all they have on their website. About as useful as a box of rocks. If anyone has some experience with the latest Calligra Flow, can they post whether or not there is any ability to use Visio compatible figures, or read Visio documents? Or, at the very least, easily import images and set glue

Come back when it uses a single window and you can draw basic shapes and link them together with lines, arrows, and objects have "snappy" corners and midpoints of their edges. That's really what 90% of people need.

Which sucks, because the Qt libraries for font rendering and printing are pretty godawful for something like a word processor. Just look at the serious kerning problems in the screenshots. I would advise Calligra to take a page from Scribus--another Qt-based project that chose to implement their own font rendering libraries to work around the shortcomings of Qt.

Newsflash: The screenshots on the Calligra website are from older development releases. Since then Qt 4.8 was released which fixes the problems.